Tim Houlihan 0:00 Picture this, Kurt: an AI agent builds you a ad, pulling in your last vacation photos with the exact words that you used on social media. Maybe even a model who looks a fair amount like you, but maybe is just slightly younger and slightly better looking. At the same moment, I get a different ad built by the same way, by the way. Except my AI model stand-in isn't quite as attractive as yours. But I don't necessarily know that because I don't see yours. You're seeing yours. I'm seeing mine. But I'm still happy with it. Is it creepy? Is it effective? I don't know. Kurt Nelson 0:40 Definitely creepy, effective. Probably, almost certainly, yes. You know, yeah, Tim Houlihan 0:47 yeah. It is. Kurt Nelson 0:48 It's the one. It's it's a small example of what our guest today calls the great flattery machine, right? And here, I think is probably the the most uncomfortable part about this is that the more AI learns about us, the more it just hands back to us a shinier version of us, and it agrees with us. It doesn't like to pick fights with us. It tells us how great our ideas. I mean, I know my ideas are great, but it tells us how great our ideas are every time, and we're entering a world where the AI mirror looks better and better for everybody. Tim Houlihan 1:34 Yeah. So, welcome to Behavior Grooves. Today, Kurt and I are talking with Oliver Sweet, a business anthropologist at Ipsos and author of the new book, The Rules That Make Us. Now, Ollie spends his career doing what most researchers often skip, like he is carefully watching how people actually behave, like in taxis in Shanghai and WhatsApp groups in London and in boardrooms everywhere, and he tracks the invisible rules underneath all of these things. Kurt Nelson 2:11 Yeah. Now Ali has a great line about the difference between psychology and anthropology, and he says psychology asks what's happening in your head, and anthropology asks what's happening between people, and once you start looking at culture that way, you start noticing vibe shifts long before headlines catch up. Brexit, the 2024 election, the 2016 election-I always saw patterns across all of those. Right. So yeah, Tim Houlihan 2:40 and so the most important thing that you're going to hear in this episode is about AI, but it's not the thing that you might expect. Ali argues that AI's endless agreeableness is quietly making us more narcissistic, and it's doing it by removing the very friction that makes teams and ideas and relationships actually work without pushback, without any kind of productive disagreement. AI is just a mirror that always tells you you look great. Kurt Nelson 3:12 Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It in our conversation with Ali, we get into some of the hidden rules of that culture, and why norms around voice notes and you know texts and different things feel so different in London than they do in Shanghai. Why your team might quietly stop talking to each other once everyone has their own AI, and how Ali's generally genuinely cool idea about listening to the silence, the things that people don't say, as one of the most underrated tools in anybody's empathy toolkit. Tim Houlihan 3:54 Yeah. So grab a fresh pour of something that makes you think twice about your own AI chat, and let's get into a good conversation with Ali Sweet. Ali Sweet, welcome to Behavioral Grooves. Speaker 1 4:15 Thank you very much for having me here. It is Tim Houlihan 4:17 absolutely a pleasure, and we want to get started with our speed round. So we want to know first and foremost: Would you prefer to learn a new language or a new instrument? Speaker 1 4:28 Good question. I I would go with new language. I think. Yes, I would go with a new language. Why Kurt Nelson 4:36 why a new language? Speaker 1 4:39 So I think it. I think it changes the way that you think. I think it opens doors in a new way. I think it changes the way that you think because language is kind of a really important structure for how culture operates. So I kind of a lot of people see language as the architecture for how we think. If you were to learn a completely different language, then you've got a different way of thinking about the world, which is a huge cultural difference. Kurt Nelson 5:09 I mean, even if you think about the way that the language is structured, right? Male and female words, the the order of verb, noun, various different pieces; those are cultural, aren't they? I mean, they're they're not hardwired in us. They are cultural Speaker 1 5:28 hugely. The ability to deal with certainty is baked into your language or ambiguity as well. So I had a really good friend from school actually who suffered when he was young, from mental health issues and psychosis, and he, when he was sort of in his early 20s, he actually moved to Mexico, learnt Spanish, and and lived in Mexico instead, and and he overcame all a lot of his mental health issues and psychosis through starting to just operate in Spanish instead of in English, wow, which I think is incredible. Yeah, wow, that Tim Houlihan 6:05 is that like rejiggered the way that he was looking at the world. His literally, but it literally changed his mind. It changes his brain. It changes the neuroscience of how he thought about things. Speaker 1 6:18 Yeah, God, it's an incredible thing, isn't it, to be able to change your language to then reframe and rethink about the world in a completely different manner, in a way that you can deal with certain problems that you couldn't deal with in another language? So I, yeah, it's just I think languages were fantastic to learn. Kurt Nelson 6:38 Wow. Okay. All right. This is a speed round, which is never speedy. So there we go. Second question was going to ask you Coke, Pepsi. Not going to do that. Might be some contractual obligations that you have on on some firmware work, but I'm going to ask you a more culturally appropriate one, which is coffee or tea. Speaker 1 6:57 Oh, this is a really problematic one for me. I'm sure you can. Any listener can hear that I'm British, and I'm come across as very British, which means it has to be tea. But it's not. I really thought it's not tea. It's not tea. It's coffee. It's coffee all the way. Tim Houlihan 7:14 Oh, okay. So that happens every now and then. But you sound very committed to coffee. Speaker 1 7:20 Oh my God! I and I really, really struggle without coffee to the point where you know when I grind it, it it sort of it sort of calms me in a way that like it it so the drug of the caffeine hits me at the point when I smell the coffee, like I'm drowning in bed with Speaker 2 7:38 coffee, Speaker 1 7:39 is part of what who I am. Where the tea, on the other hand, I just find it's like a murky liquid. I can't get on board with tea. But everyone in Britain drinks tea. You go to someone's house, like I'm an anthropologist. I go and visit people in their homes to understand what they do. The first thing they ask me for is, "Would you like a cup of tea? I have to say yes. I was going to say you can't Kurt Nelson 8:04 say no. Speaker 2 8:05 Yeah. Speaker 1 8:05 Culturally, I'm not allowed to say no. It's one of the rules. Yeah. Right. But I don't enjoy tea. I really don't like Tim Houlihan 8:11 it. We we we shouldn't be spending this time. But I am curious. There is there is a story as to why you it wasn't you weren't bumped on the head when you were a child. There is a particular reason for this. Can can you expand on that? Speaker 1 8:28 There is a. I think you know my my early caffeine career, if that's a thing, is was from about 15 onwards. My parents moved to France and ran a bed and breakfast, and I was kind of the dog's body of the bed and breakfast, so cleaning rooms, doing the shopping, and obviously I had to constantly make people cups of coffee. And just as I was getting into caffeine and having to work quite hard on this bed and breakfast and need caffeine a lot, I was just making people coffee, and I loved it, and I really enjoyed it. And then I spent more time in England afters was like no no I don't need tea that's just do you do you Tim Houlihan 9:05 favor French coffee today as an adult Speaker 1 9:08 not anymore not anymore I think no I think the world of coffee has moved on since I was 20 years old and I'm really sorry to the French listeners here I don't think French coffee has moved on. Tim Houlihan 9:21 Oh snap! Okay. Sorry, sorry for the burn to Speaker 1 9:27 the French listeners here. Yeah, that's not a good one. It's it's no Italian coffee has moved on to wonderful things. In fact, American coffee can be amazing. Like all the South American variants, and and the French, not so much. Tim Houlihan 9:42 Wow. Okay. Yeah. The revelations we're getting so early in this conversation. I think it's fantastic. Everything's a Speaker 1 9:49 cultural conversation. Tim Houlihan 9:50 Everything. Everything's culture. Okay. Third speed round question. Agree or disagree with this statement, Ollie? Psychology is overrated, and anthropology. Is underused. Speaker 1 10:02 I mean, it's a yes, but I feel like if we were in the same room, you might be throwing things at me now. Kurt Nelson 10:09 Maybe not throwing. We might just be giving you evil glares, right? So there you go. Okay. Yeah, right. We're going to come back. We'll come back to that one. All right. The last of our speed round questions here, Ali. Can one be too fat to fit in an imaginary boat? Say maybe your uncle's imaginary boat. Speaker 1 10:37 Well, this kind of depends on whether you follow your head, your cognition, or your culture. Ah! Kurt Nelson 10:47 All right. So this was this was so a great again. We're talking about like about his new book here, the rules that make us, and it's it's right at the very beginning. And but but I thought it was really funny as as you were telling, relating a story that your grandmother kind of tells of your uncle. Can you explain that story a little bit for our listeners, and then what the implications? As you said, am I in my head or am I in my culture component of that? Speaker 1 11:14 My grandmother was actually a great source of stories for this book because I think that she sees over the years, she's seen culture very clearly, and one of the stories she said to me: "So my grandfather was a politician, and when he was sort of just rising in British politics, he invited all these people round for dinner because that's what you did because you needed to get to know people and schmooze people and make connections. And once this quite influential politician came round called Ron, and my uncle Tony was-I think he was three years old-and he turned a bench upside down, and he was pretending to row his boat, and which was lovely, and it was very sweet. And Ron came in, and he said, "Oh, he wanted to make friends with the family. And he said, "Oh, what what are you doing? And Tony looked up and he said, "I'm rowing in my boat. And Ron said, "Oh, that looks a lot of fun. And then he said, "Can I get in with you and row? And kind of Tony looked up at him really suspiciously and said, "No, you're too fat, which is obviously a terrible thing to say. It's a deeply rude thing to say. But as a three-year-old, he was just-he was just thinking what he saw. He was being honest. He was being honest, right? He was, but culture hadn't taught him that he wasn't allowed to say this thing yet? So, so then Ron came back and he said, sort of very suspiciously, because in politics everyone is suspicious of each other. He said, "Did your father say that to you? As in, like, is this political backstabbing? And then Uncle Tony, three-year-old, looked up at him and said, "No, I've got eyes, haven't I? Ouch! I know, I know, such a burn, and I, you know, and my grandmother pretended not to laugh because that was, you know, you shouldn't do that, should you? And told Tony off, and but I think it's a it is this example of how we are constantly changing the way that we think because of what is right and wrong out there in the world, or what we're told is right and wrong, and that become those rules of how how we're supposed to act become the rules of culture. But as a three year old, you haven't really embodied culture yet. A three-year-old, you're just developing your mind. So you see something, you say it, and yeah, I thought it was a wonderful story, and terrible, obviously. Tim Houlihan 13:53 It absolutely is. You are an anthropologist. You're you're a business anthropologist. Can you just help listeners who might not be familiar with sort of the the differences between anthropology and psychology? How how might you be looking at the world differently than a psychologist might be looking at the world, for instance? Speaker 1 14:15 So I actually did my undergraduate in psychology, and I actually have I love psychology? I've got a huge amount of respect for it. I've also done a lot of therapy, so I kind of appreciate bravology. Bravo to you! And what is? We won't make it about that today. Don't worry. But one of the things that I've seen is that in psychology? Obviously, focus on what's going on in your head and how you can deal with certain issues that you might personally have, and it also helps you figure out how to deal with external ideas that might be there that might be challenging to you. But nonetheless. The focus is what happens on inside your head, and anthropology might look at some of the same issues about how people interact together. But it starts from a position of what is what is the interaction like? What happens between people? And if we start to look what happens between people, we see a set of rules, social interactions, and fundamentally a set of behaviors that builds up to what we would describe as culture. So I think psychology is fantastic at understanding cognition, and the rise of behavioral science, looking at cognitive psychology and social psychology, has been really good at figuring out how we think, both internally to external internal stimulus and external stimulus. And anthropology, on the other hand, looks at what happens between groups of people and how that works. So that's the kind of debate, the culture, the cognition versus culture debate, and that's what I tried to put as a central thing throughout the book. Kurt Nelson 16:01 Yeah, it's a it's it's fascinating, and I love how you describe that difference in various different things. And one of the things in in the book, you you keep coming back to this: why do we do what we do? Which is really interesting because that's what we have actually talked about on this show. Is is this is why we do the show? Is why do we do why we do? And so we're we're super excited to talk to you. One of the central themes of your book involves these kind of concept of hidden rules, and and I'll put air quotes around hidden, you know. But the the rules that we don't necessarily see like they're not blatant. They're not like a rule that's written up on the on a sign somewhere, but the rules almost like your your uncle Tony, like you don't call somebody fat in you know in when they're invited over for dinner. So, could you provide outside of your your uncle's example, maybe some illustrations of how cultural manifests this into some of the rules that we have on every day. Speaker 1 17:06 Absolutely. So I'm I'm always fascinated by a lot of the mundane differences, a lot of the small differences that we take for granted all the time, but then when you come into contact with them, you're like, whoa, this is really strange, because some of them are. And so one of the so I went. It was one of my first trips, second or third trip to China. It was about sort of 12 years ago or something, and I landed in Shanghai, and I was there on business and work. I was there for like 10 days, and and I sort of went through the airport, and it's a it was a complete stimulation for me. I was like, this is all very different, very weird. And I got into a taxi, and in the taxi, he drove me for about an hour into the middle of Shanghai, and he was going down these kind of motorways, and there were four lanes, and he was swerving between them all. And one of the things he was doing was playing on his phone. Joy, great! While he's driving, Tim Houlihan 18:08 while he's Speaker 1 18:09 driving, yeah, while he's driving, while he's he's getting through some pretty small spaces in between those four lanes as well. Yeah, I know. And he was kind of swiping with his hand. And what he was doing is that he was basically going through his his WhatsApp his WeChat messages, which is a bit like WhatsApp. And WhatsApp was quite new to me 12 years ago. We had messages, but we weren't using it in quite the same way. And what he was doing is he would jump into a group, and he could hear someone speak, and then another person would speak, and another person would speak, and another person would speak, and then he would press record, and then then drop a voice message in. So what he was doing was essentially using voice messages in the chat, but so was everybody else. So I'm still in lots of WhatsApp groups all over for various different groups, whether it's parents or schools or work or friends, and it's 90% of the time, 95% of the time, it's all typed out. But what I saw with him, like literally 12 years ago, so a long, long time ago, it was all voice to voice to voice to voice to voice. Yeah, and I was just like, wow, this is wildly different. And then I kind of started to think about it, and I asked the started to other ask other people in China, and they're like, "Yeah, that's pretty normal actually. We do that all the time with our groups too. And I said, "Well, why do you do it? Is it just easier? Is it? And they said, "No, it's it's actually really nice because you hear someone's voice. And I was like, "Huh, that is nice actually. You like you can you can misinterpret what someone's typed quite a lot, and that causes some problems, right? Someone means something as a joke, you hear it in their voice, but you don't see it written down. So I came back to the UK, and you know I had a team of about 15 people in the UK, and I was like, "Come on, we're all anthropologists. We're we're there to try new things, try new cultural experiences, and we've got to." Work WhatsApp group, and I was like, "Come on, let's let's let's all do voice. Absolute silence. No one wanted to do it, and then they started texting in, and I was like, "And so I dropped a voice message in and said, 'Hey, shouldn't we be doing it as voice messages because you know we can understand each other's intonation so much better. We can understand like what someone's point of view, and then they just turned on me, calling me a weirdo, they were like, "No, why are you trying to do this weird thing? And I was like, "Yeah. And still to this day, whenever I receive a voice message, which is more common these days, it's more common. But if I still I look at it for a second, and 90% of the time, I put my phone down and I don't play Speaker 3 20:40 it, like Speaker 1 20:41 because there's still something there from a cultural point of view, which is basically being quite private and like not necessarily liking this invasion of a voice coming out of my phone. That and and certainly not wanting to play that voice message when anyone else is around. Oh yeah, yeah, and and so these things we've grown up with this sort of set of values in Britain, in the UK, in the US, everywhere else, and these values kind of inform all these different other behaviors. So like how people use WhatsApp is it informs that, and this idea of privacy, this idea of being able to not you know, not interrupt someone else's moment. So if I play a message that's interrupting someone else's moment, like that's not cool in my world. Totally fine in China. They play the messages out loud all the time. Totally normal. The taxi driver who was letting me hear the whole thing. I mean, you probably knew I couldn't speak Tim Houlihan 21:40 Chinese. But still, what? So, how does it? Norms change. Social norms change over time, or they can, and yet we use these as these thumbnails. The this this rule of thumb, I should say, for how we're going to make all these behaviors in our life. And it's much easier, you know, to use this heuristic, but when do what is it that that is the tipping point? What is it that starts to make social norms change? Like, is it possible? Like, could you imagine a time in the future when, in the UK, it becomes the norm to to share messages by voice rather than by typing them out? Speaker 1 22:18 So I think these things do change, and there's a number of factors why. And you know, my cousin, who is a generation younger than me, always sends me voice notes all the time, even though I tell him it's really annoying. He's just still because, and so I know, and I know in his generation it's far more common. It's far more common because, and people do it on the go a lot more, and it's a bit easier for the sender as well. So I actually think voice notes. It's easier for the sender, but it's harder for the receiver. Tim Houlihan 22:52 Yes. Speaker 1 22:53 Right. So actually, it changes the dynamic of the message, and I think in that younger generation, actually, it's a little bit more me in that generation. It's a bit more like, what do I want? What do I need to do? How am I going to do it? Rather than thinking about the other person, and I don't say that with judgment. I don't say that with judgment at all. Like it's fine. It's just changed a bit. But these things do change over time. And one of the big there's several different things that help change culture. Technology is a huge one, right? So technological change changes the way that we interact. We can go into social media in a minute because that's changed the way that we interact a lot. Infrastructure, like you know, being able to move around, changes like culture, regulation, and government that changes culture. So all of these things do change things, but the culture changes in small but very very steady direction. So it changes small ways, sort of year by year. But over the course of say 10 or 20 years, it fundamentally reshapes the way we interact with one another. And some of those changes they seem so small at the time that there's there is is nothing to be concerned about, but then you've got to a place 10 years time later where it's actually quite different. Kurt Nelson 24:08 You you you bring up a term in the book called vibe shift. Is that what you just described, or is that more help help our listeners understand what vibe shift Speaker 1 24:17 is? Yeah, I think a vibe shift is is is kind of. I mean, it's funny actually. As I was writing the book, and I had been sort of talking about vibe shifts a little while, and a lot of people were like, "Stop saying vibes. It's not cool. I was like, "No, this this is this is something that we sense. This is something that we sense in the world, right? And I think anthropologists are trying to sense something that's happening, so a vibe shift, and then suddenly, the what was it? The 2024 election of Donald Trump. That was called a vibe shift as well, and I was like, "Oh, it's in the press now. Wasn't me that they were quoting, but nonetheless, I think it's one of those terms that is important to understand because, so. Certain certain ways of of looking at how people feel cross culturally or in subcultures is that you can ask people about their values. So what's important to you, and why is that important? And what do you think about the future? And these kinds of things. And and how should you bring up a family? And what is what's fair in the world? These kinds of things of values. Now, people's values are relatively stable, but again, they do shift and change over time. Yeah. But again, we tend not to notice that values have changed until something seismic comes along, and then suddenly you feel it. Suddenly you feel that vibe, and you notice that there's been a vibe shift. So, I'll give you an example in the UK. You'll certainly have heard that we voted Brexit in 2016 to leave the European Union, and what happened then is it shocked a lot of people in London in what was called the metropolitan elite. They didn't see it coming, and that's because over the previous 10 years, so from about 2006 to 2016, people's values had started changing quite a lot, but nobody had really picked up on it. And then the Brexit campaign had noticed this, and they basically said, "This campaign is about whether you. They didn't say this explicitly, but implicitly, it's exactly what it was. Do you think the past was better than the future, or do you think the future will be better than the past? And the Brexit campaign realized that people were very upset with some of the changes that had happened in the last 10 years, and they said a lot of they tapped into that kind of the past is is better than the future. So they got very nostalgic in that campaign. They said they said they were going to change the passport color, the color of your passport, back to blue, which is what it used to be years ago. Right? These really kind of silly things, but they were highly symbolic, highly symbolic about some of the changes that had happened. Whether the the Remain in Europe campaign had said the future will be better, and actually they missed the mark on the vibe in the country. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 27:15 it's interesting because when you talk like you bring it up in that manner, you can again. 2016 was when Trump was elected into the U.S. Again, the slogan "Make America Great Again" mirrors right. It mirrors what you were just talking about from the Brexit component of where that vibe people are nostalgia for the past, or are they, you know, looking forward to a a brighter future? Is that would you equate those two? Speaker 1 27:46 Exactly, exactly, exactly the same thing. And again, a lot of commentators that I could see in the U.S. did not pick Donald Trump winning because they had because a lot of the the liberal elite, as we call them in the UK, I don't know if that term works in the US, but in London, they they they don't experience the same problems that people in different parts of the country are experiencing. So they got completely out of touch with this shift, and they got completely. They were like, "Oh, well, that's just silly, isn't it? You're like, "Ha, that's a very, very dangerous statement to be making. Yeah. Because no, the electorate is not silly. They are feeling things that might be different to you, and if you can't understand them, you really need to get out there and start meeting them in their place where they are, because then you'll you'll get it. Tim Houlihan 28:42 Well, and you point out that these these differences are massive when it comes to culture to culture. Like in China, there's a tremendous amount of enthusiasm about the future, right? There's this this buoyancy, right? Speaker 1 28:56 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we do actually poll this and measure this at Ipsos. So I work at Ipsos, and we we do lots and lots of different polling and and surveys, and and and that is that since Brexit, we we've started asking that exact same question because we wanted to pick up on that shift and say is the past better than the future? Is the future better than the past? I think about 24% of the UK at the moment is saying that the future is better than the past, which is you know huge swing. And in China, it's about you know 85, 88% people are saying the future is going to be better. Speaker 4 29:30 Wow, Speaker 1 29:31 so different. And if you imagine going back to like how you think, right, this becomes the archet like culture becomes the architecture for how you think about the world? Do you, if you think the future is going to be better than the past, you are your culture is imbuing so much optimism before you, right? Go find out what's going to happen. It's all going to be better. Have children. They're going to live a wonderful life compared to a huge pessimism that comes across, which. Is oh yeah tomorrow next year is going to be tougher than this year. What having children would you really do that? That's what kind of world are you bringing them into? And these conversations happen. What kind of world are you bringing children into? And it's it comes down to the kind of vibe and the culture. Tim Houlihan 30:17 Yeah, birth rate in the United States is declining right now, which, as as you said, the electorate is not stupid. They're they're making decisions about something that they're feeling that might be irrational, but it's it's certainly not certainly not stupid. Speaker 5 30:34 Yeah, Tim Houlihan 30:36 Kurt, would would you? I'd like to see if we could turn the conversation more it's towards AI because I you you you teed up some really interesting AI stuff and there's some musical components of the AI discussion I want to get to later. Just going to tee that up as a teaser, but since the book was since you turned over the final manuscript and where we're at today, I'm sure things have changed. Where do you? But let's just talk first about AI and culture. Is what's the relationship between AI and culture? Is AI driving culture? Is culture driving AI? What? How do you see that playing out? Speaker 1 31:16 It's a very good question, and AI is a technology that is in so much, so many different parts of our life, that and it's essentially learnt from Kurt Nelson 31:29 us. Yeah, Speaker 1 31:29 that it is both part of culture and it's changing culture at the same time, and in so many varied, different ways. So there's a few things that I like talking about on this one because I think that there's there's some things that we really really need to to look out for. So the first one is about social media, right? Social. So obviously AI drives a lot of social media in terms of its sort of algorithms and the way it works and the way that we interact with it. So and and that's continuing at speed, and so by the way, whenever I talk about technology, AI, I'm I'm talking about how it affects us as people rather than technology itself. Right. So because because I'm I'm concerned about culture and how people interact, and when I've I've done lots of studies on on young people or Gen Z, as they're often called, and whenever I do a study on them, I have to sort of figure out what they do on social media. It's a kind of classic part of the report. It's like their social media behaviors, and I go and talk to them, and I say, "Can you show me what's on your feed? And they say, "Sure, and they show me three, and then I say, "Can you look on the stats on your phone and show me how long you're spending on social media platforms each day. Now, maybe not that shocking anymore, but it's you know it's around four hours a day, five hours a day. It's a lot, but we're used to this now. And I I say, Tim, so so just as a really conservative guess, really conservative estimate. If you're spending about four hours on social media day, say that's 30 seconds per post, which is quite generous. That's about 700 different posts that you're seeing every single day. Wow! And I say to them, how many can you remember from yesterday? The average. is normally about five. All right, you can remember about five of the 700 posts that you go through yesterday, and my real question is: What happens to those 695 other posts that people don't see, but we're pretty sure that they acknowledge. So we know that neuroscience, you know, suggests that if you see something for two seconds, you have some level of recognition there. That's why YouTube doesn't let you skip the ad until they get to three seconds. You know, they've done their done their homework, and and so all of this stuff is getting lodged in our brains, but we are not giving it any kind of rational assessment. And we know a lot of the media that's on social media is designed to convince you of something, particularly when you start going into the manosphere, you go into political polarization, you go into all of these kind of like it's designed to convince you of stuff, and you're not giving it any rational assessment about whether you think this is right or wrong. You're not finding out whether you're not fact checking. You're not saying does this line up with my values? Actually, you know I like to think that I am generous, kind, but this this post is kind of suggesting that maybe I should not like that group of people for a certain reason. I don't think we're thinking about that enough, and if we're not thinking about it, but it is affecting us, essentially what we're doing is we're allowing social. Media to act as a form of subliminal messaging. We're allowing it to kind of what you know. A lot of doomsday people saying it's hacking our minds. Maybe I think we need to be specific about the mechanism with which that's happening. And I think that that level of information that we're taking in, but not rationally assessing, is something we really need to look at a lot more. We're Tim Houlihan 35:23 volunteering for this, like we're we're we're engaging in it with some degree of intention. Yes, Speaker 1 35:30 yes, yeah, yes. So when so the term subliminal messaging started in the late 60s with a researcher called James Vickery, and he spliced single frame images into films, and he said, "Ah, when people came out the movie, they all bought popcorn or they all bought Coke, hurrah! And he announced this, and everyone went, "Why do you do that? You're horrible! Yeah. And then within within about a year, the U.S. Australia, UK had legislated against subliminal messaging, and now we willingly sign up for it. Kurt Nelson 36:07 Oh, right there, right there! I think you you nailed it on on that. And the other piece is that you know social is not social media used to be like I connected with friends or people that I knew, and various different things, and I saw a some statistic that said less than 10% of all social media posts now come from people that we know that they are from influencers, corporations, other people who have an agenda. At some point, it's not about Tim and me and you just like getting out there and and you know telling about our kids or telling about what we did over the weekend. It now has a component, so that makes what you've just stated, I think, even that much more powerful, Right. Yeah. Speaker 1 37:01 Exactly. Exactly. Because we're is no longer focused on being social. It's now a different media source, because and it's more about how we influence people. To be honest. Tim Houlihan 37:14 Yeah. Kurt Nelson 37:19 Hey, Grooves. We want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to Behavioral Grooves. If you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going, here are a few simple ways that you can support the show. Tim Houlihan 37:32 First off, subscribing to our Substack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox. Kurt Nelson 37:44 And if you haven't already, leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that: one, it gives us a boost, and two, it costs nothing, Tim Houlihan 38:00 and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs up. Kurt Nelson 38:10 We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests. Tim Houlihan 38:16 Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful, behavior-changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 38:27 I want to dig into AI. So, social media, obviously, big thing. AI and and its use. I've been doing some some research into how AI is being adapted inside of organizations and what it's doing inside of organizations from organizational culture, various different pieces, and one of the things that we're seeing is that AI can not always, but it can decrease teamwork and collaboration. Where I used to have to go to my team, I had a question. I say my sales team, and I have a client, and I run into an issue. Well, where do I get the an answer to that? I I ask my team today. What I can do is I can just go chat chat GTP, type it in. I get a really fluent, maybe even a better answer than what I would get from my team. But that means that I'm not talking to that team. I'm losing those interconnections. So, how do you see AI as it relates to kind of the cultural components within organizations? I don't know if you have any insight on this or any thoughts. If you just what what are you thinking? Yeah, Speaker 1 39:38 yeah. I think that that that I haven't heard that example before, but it makes so much sense because one of the things that a lot of people are feeling about AI is that it kind of democratizes information and intelligence, and everybody has access, and a lot of particularly younger people. Are calling it the great leveler, you know. So everybody has access to the same thing. Therefore, I can quickly go and make money from AI. I can have all the intelligence. I can write a book. I can do this, right? And AI is focusing much more on us as individuals than it is on us collaborating. So what you've said makes total sense to me because it is there to serve us. And one of the things that it has done incredibly well is it's learnt from us about us, right? So it will give us things that are inherently pleasing, you know. It is it is ridiculously sycophantic as well. Yeah. Right. Oh, what a wonderful question, Ollie. No, I'm just asking. Like, what color should I paint my walls? But that's the Kurt Nelson 40:54 best question I could have. You could have asked. There you go. Speaker 1 40:58 Yeah, I've got a great way for you to combine tuna and green beans. Who would have thought of it? It's such a great. Come on, come on. But but it is incredibly symphonic. But but it is there to learn from us, and it is there to feed us. So, and collaboration can be hard work. Yeah. Right. It can be difficult, but the friction. This is why organizations are better than individuals. The friction is often what makes an idea better, and it often what makes a team better, and it's often what makes like great ideas come when people collaborate and they have productive disagreement. You cannot have productive disagreement with AI, right? It just if you say no, you're wrong. It goes, oh yeah, you're right. I am wrong. Let's go in this line then, right? It doesn't do that. It doesn't do that, and and and I do I do have this. I have a big problem with with this very idea around AI because it's learned about us in order to help us be more like ourselves, essentially. Now, if you think about what that means for us as individuals, yes, we we go to AI more because we like it, but it essentially makes us a lot more narcissistic, right? It tells us that our ideas are right. It tells us why our ideas are right. It tells us all of these things about how wonderful we are and how we what we think. Yet it and it doesn't ever challenge us. So if as culture moves into lots of different subcultures everywhere, what we see is in those subcultures, people basically don't see outside of them, so one of the things that will happen a lot more is that we all got our own personal AI. So AI that is literally designed to learn about me, to do some basic tasks on my behalf, answer emails, arrange dates with my friends, go to nice like theater, fun stuff, you know, and as it starts to arrange those things for me, and take me to certain places, and give me certain news articles or you know things that I think it thinks I will be interested in, it's just feeding me things that I will like, and it's never feeding me things that will challenge me, and I think that I'm we're moving towards a whole of kind of digital narcissism, where our digital environment will be catered to de to help me be more like me and never challenge me at all. So I will just think I'm amazing, right? So I work a lot with like advertisers because I help them build campaigns. And imagine, I say this to some of my, you know, my colleagues who work in advertising, and I say to them, if I could build you an AI that could scan, you know, the internet footprint, and you know, I could create a set of adverts just for you, Kurt, that are based on so you know some nice clothing, some great new clothes that have just come out, and is in each of the adverts, it's kind of like the person looks a bit like you, and they've been on holiday to your last holiday place, and they use some of the words that you've been using on social media to describe things, and imagine that advert was just for you, and then a completely different one for you, Tim, which is based on where you've been on holiday and the type of clothes you like and what you, how you talk to your kids, right? Would would an advertiser buy that? And an advertiser was like, Yeah, of course I would. I could sell so much stuff like that, and that's not an impossible thing to imagine, right? No, Tim Houlihan 44:41 no. Kind of, Speaker 1 44:43 and and if we're just seeing ourselves in all the adverts that are around us, and in everything in of our digital environment just reflects who we are because AI can learn from us like that, then we're never going to see any difference, and that's problem. There's there's genuine problems with that. Tim Houlihan 45:00 Well, at at some point, the the anthropol the anthropological record is clear that collaboration has been a key to our success as a species. So, at some point, does our DNA revolt against this? I mean, can you imagine? Just like like, come on! Too much narcissism is going to get in our way at some point, is is can could you imagine that also, Ali? Speaker 1 45:24 You see, I love that as an idea. I love it as an idea, and we're a very sort of early nascent stage of AI to the point where many of us don't really feel it's in our lives or figure out how it's affecting our lives. But there is a movement, certainly amongst younger people, to start rejecting it. Yeah, the Kurt Nelson 45:43 booing at the commencements that has come. I was going to ask: is that is that kind of a a shift in in in that perspective? Speaker 1 45:52 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a booing of commence of you know big AI leaders standing up and doing talks. But I also think that in a lot of workplaces that I go into and talk to people about, it's the younger generation in that workplace who are the people who are most skeptical of AI and don't want to use it. And I think that comes from two places. Firstly, is that the younger generation see AI as kind of ripping jobs out of their cohort, and they're probably right. Yeah. Secondly, they see that if they use AI, they haven't learnt in the same way that the older people in that organization did, so they don't really kind of pick up what the skills are that they need. Yeah. And all of us old farts in the organization are looking down at the young kids, going, "Come on, you're the young ones. You should be doing AI. Come on, help me out with AI. And it's actually the more senior people who have got that experience and judgment who can use AI and go, "You know what? The AI that's that's done that-that's great. This stuff is not going to work. That's just AI being silly. But at a younger level, when you're just entry level, you don't have the same level of judgment. So they're like, "Oh, how do I decide? Is it all good? Is it all bad? So it's still very early stage, but I would love to see some kind of Luddite revolution coming back to help us collaborate more. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 47:18 I'm hoping we won't just be Luddites, but we might. I might be that. Well, you Kurt Nelson 47:24 advocate in the book. You advocate for a tech Sabbath, right? I think that's one of the things. So maybe it's just doing some things like that. So actually, tell us about what is a tech Sabbath from as you advocate for. Yeah, Speaker 1 47:36 it's it. I think it's a wonderful idea that I've seen people doing is that they will have a general kind of sense of of digital detox. So, some people are doing it on a Sunday, right? A Sunday should be a time of rest and recuperation for the rest of the week. And actually, being stuck on your phone is just a stupid, disastrous thing. And some people are are not engaging in tech. Some people, some families are going a step further where they literally block the internet on a certain day, right? So you go into a home and you kind of get rid of it. Some nightclubs, theaters, restaurants-they when you go in as well, they you have to hand your phone over and they wrap it up in bubble wrap and give it back to you, so you can't use your phone or technology in the nightclub. And I can tell you, I've been to when I first discovered this about three or four years ago in Berlin. That nightclub was just wild and free. And what happens when you take technology out of a nightclub? Suddenly, people dance however they want, and they dance with the biggest smile because they're doing something they really want, and they're not worried about it coming out and being on social media or stuff like that. So I think that we're moving to a place where technology and AI isn't going to be welcome. Is like you know, stop! You're not welcome here, and I think that's really nice. And I think we're starting as a group to start to recognize that a bit as well. Tim Houlihan 49:11 I I'm grateful to hear that. There's just some clubs in my neck of the woods, my area that I live in, that I've heard about recently that are doing the same thing, and when when the journalists go and interview people who are going in or coming out, they are ebullient. They're just so happy, like my gosh, we've just had this fantastic experience of spending two hours with people that we didn't know, and we talked to them, and so maybe that appeals to my luddite, I suppose. But I think it's Kurt Nelson 49:48 it's it's interesting because again, bringing this culturally, right? When I was growing up, we didn't have that, so you would go out to a club, you could dance however you wanted, and maybe somebody had. A Polaroid camera would be the only thing that, like, you could be an idiot, and you, but it would never get out. It would never impact beyond that local friends that you tell a story, and then memory gets changed anyway, and so it doesn't really matter, right? But this whole there's a whole generation of people who have grown up where that's not the case, where they understand everything that they do in public could somehow come back and be part of their permanent record, and it has to be freeing to a certain degree to say no, that's not going to happen. It's a new thing, which is not new for what we had experienced growing up, but it's new for this generation. I don't know. Again, culturally, that has to be something that is like just the way people think. Again, to your point of they act differently because of that, right? Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 50:56 This idea of of risk taking behavior. Now, for our generation, we were taught that risk-taking behavior helped you learn about what the limits were and weren't. And many of the times, we overstepped it. And when we overstepped it, God, we knew it, and that was terrible. But imagine if you overstepped it, and the whole world knew it. Oh God, that is just the worst. So you're constantly like I didn't have to make that assessment, and there's an extra level of an extra burden I would say placed on people nowadays about you know what happens if everybody knows this. I'm I'm having to assess levels of risk so much more all the time because something might appear and go viral, and and maybe 90% of the time it doesn't. But the risk of it and the presence of like that level of technology in your life, I think, is really hard to deal with. Tim Houlihan 51:58 Ali, you write about the empathy muscle and the important the importance of being empathetic in our world. You end the book with these five techniques that I'm just going to just rattle through them, just so that listeners can can hear them because I I found this fascinating. Walk a mile in someone else's shoes, build your empathy muscle, be observant, ask great questions, and listen to the silence. Could you pick your favorite child right now? Can you just just is there one of those that you could riff on for just a minute that you think, oh, this is really important? I want people to walk away, just knowing this one. Speaker 1 52:37 I think probably listening to the silences. I think listening to the silences is a very interesting thing on two levels. On two levels. So, firstly, when I go and talk to people, interview them, I love to ask a question, and then I love to just keep quiet for a long time. So silence is a wonderful, and and and you you hear this in therapy as well. This is a psychological technique as much as an anthropological technique. But just staying silent allows people to go a little bit further with their thinking, and a little bit further, and a little bit further. And that that is kind of wonderful because you allow people the space to think about their own things even more. And the way that social interaction works is that you speak, I speak, you speak, I speak. And if you take, if you change that that social interaction and you stay silent for longer, people come to their own realizations better. But the second part of sort of knowing, seeing the silence, or listening to the silence, I should say, is that it's what people don't tell you about, and you have to think about the problem in the world a little bit more. But when you do, you can go, okay, so we might be talking. We might be dancing around this idea around what health means. Huge idea, right? So you can talk about you can talk about health in terms of nutrition, in terms of exercise. You can talk about it in terms of weight. You can talk about it in social status, and then you can have this conversation with them for a long time, and then you sort of think, what have we not discussed? Why does some? What has someone not told me about? And maybe they've not told you about their parents, right? And what their parents went through, or what their parent, how their parents treated them, for example, or they might not have told you about illness or disease, and you go, and and then sometimes you touch on these things, and people just go, they don't want to talk about it. You're like, huh, this is this is a big issue actually, and we see this in individuals, but you see this in cultures and in society. There. Certain things that we, as a collective, don't want to talk about. Right? We don't want to talk about sex. We don't want to talk about debt. We don't want to talk about anything that goes on in the manosphere and all of that kind of stuff, right? We don't want to talk about you know lots of other things like that. That death. We don't like talking about deaths. Right? And if we don't talk about them, then we have problems with them because we need to work out what's going on. The reason that the manosphere grew in such a big way is because men didn't feel comfortable talking about what it was like to be a man, and therefore we just went. Oh no! Well, you know, this is this is this is a time for women to explore Me Too, and that was an amazing movement. But it, but for some reason, men stopped talking about being a man as well, and that meant that people wanted to talk about being a man, but they didn't know how to, so they kind of went underground, and you know, you see that you know people don't people want to talk about sex, but they don't feel that they can. Therefore, it goes underground. And the porn industry, by the way, is huge as a result of the fact that we don't talk about sex. So silences, I think, are fascinating. The Kurt Nelson 56:20 you you in the a you you have a great chapter on the future. I loved it. Two things really struck me. You you talked about first is don't expect people to change, right? So if you're trying to anticipate the future, like people are people, and and as much as we go, oh, we're you know no, we we are kind of consistent. But the second, and I thought this was really interesting, is that we should look at the counterculture to see where the future is going. And so, all right, you just talked about the manosphere, different things, lots of countercultures. How do we know which counterculture to look at, or is it just we need to have a view of this and then watch which ones are growing and which are gaining traction, et cetera? How how does that work? Speaker 1 57:09 So this is a this is a big point I talk about quite a lot at the moment. In and culture, when I started working as an ethnographer in anthropology, you know, 20 plus years ago, it used to used to find something, used to look at what mainstream culture was. So the things that a lot of people engage in, and go back 20 years ago, right? There were I had four or five channels to watch on TV, right? So we all watched the same stuff, right? There were only four or five, or maybe 20 radio stations, but you know, you all listen to the same things, and you all kind of, you know, you all engage in the same kind of media, and then you look at something that felt countercultural, and you're like, that's cool, and in time, mainstream culture will go to what's cool, and that's changed in the last 20 years. That's changed a lot. And what we see now is that you see something that's countercultural on one side, and it's challenging the mainstream. And an equal and opposite happens on the other side. And the difference now is that both of those will succeed. Previously, culture went in one direction. Now it goes in divergent directions in all sort of different. If we can look at politics, we can look at gender, we can look at influences, we can look at music, and all of those things pull us in separate directions. So this idea that the manosphere grew, basically, it grew because of you know gender female emancipation and Me Too movement and trying to get gender equality, which was all right. But then we did we didn't we missed the countercultural manosphere stuff that grew as well. So it will all happen. So basically, if you see something happening, look at it, and then bet that something else on the opposite is happening too. But it's much easier to hide for longer these days than it used to. Tim Houlihan 59:10 Well, you you mentioned you said the word music, so I'm just going to apologize here, Ali, that you just opened opened a can of worms with that one little Five-letter word, because you you write about an AI agent from China that is or an AI manifestation of voice voice and physical appearance as well. Am I pronouncing it right? Nunuri, is it? Speaker 1 59:38 I believe that's how you pronounce it okay. Tim Houlihan 59:41 Where Nunori has actually been signed by Warner Music Group as an artist, and yet Nunui is 100% AI created in every every element of Nunuri's form. First of all, scares the living daylights out of me. He's a musician, right? But what does that say about to play off of your culture and counterculture divergence? Is this just the beginning of? Well, let me say this. Let me also say one other thing. Spotify is accepting between 60 and 100,000 AI generated songs into their catalog every single day. So, so that, so maybe that trend is already en route. Maybe we're already on that path. But what what do you think about this idea of Nunuri as a complete embodiment of everything that we would think about as human, with voice and appearance, and being completely AI generated. Speaker 1 1:00:48 I think the that the the rise of Nunori is kind of amazing in China. It and it really showcases a level of trust and optimism that that that the Chinese have for how technology is going to help them in the world, compared to the level of anxiety and pessimism that we have about technology over in the West, because we're looking at it going, you cannot have an AI artist. They have not generated that, and that's because music for us is in the past. Right? Is it not literally in the past? But the what music should represent is about people singing, dancing, making you know, using instruments, and being very physical and stuff with stuff, and and obviously over the years music has changed enormously. Like you know, we've we've gone from you know it's quite traditional classical music through to like getting a lot heavier with our instruments and getting a lot more thrashy through moving through to much more electronic forms of music, and a lot of the electronic forms of music. There's no instrument being played at all, but we we've accepted it. So this is kind of weirdly a natural progression of music. But as soon as you take a person out, suddenly we freak out a little bit in the West, and like I I find I find I find it kind of weird because are you are you focused on the journey? Is the journey of how you arrived there important, or do you only care about the endpoint? So, for instance, there could well be many artists that like to you know they don't want the fame, they want to hide away, like and and maybe they're AI or maybe they're just shy, but if you have a shy person who doesn't want to show their face, totally acceptable. If it's an AI-driven bit of music, same piece of music, by the way, same piece of music, but just the journey and the story to get there is quite different. How do we feel about it? If it we feel differently, Kurt Nelson 1:02:58 yeah. Well, I think that's a it's it's an interesting question. I mean, we're getting philosophical here, but you know, you talked about culture as this the the connections between people, right? It's between people. What happens if one of those entities isn't a person anymore? How what does that do to culture? So you can all right. We have the musical part, right? There's also there's been like some really interesting studies that say you know if a person receives a you know a wonderful written you know card from somebody and they go oh this is so kind but then they realize well I used AI to generate it. All of a sudden, it feels like I I I I was really appreciative. Now I'm actually feeling kind of grossed out. So, what is it about that from your perspective? I mean, where do you see that going? Is do we need to have that person to person? What happens when the world becomes like everybody has their own personal AI, you know, secretary, and that gets all my correspondence goes out, and so I'm not even talking to another person; they're being talked to. Speaker 1 1:04:11 So there's AI. I think there's a sort of narrative in a lot of organizations that AI is cheating. If you use AI, then you're cheating. If you use AI to write an email, that's cheating. If you use AI to write something on social media, because then that's cheating. But you're kind of assessing that you're basically saying it has less value. The end product might be exactly the same. Yeah, but the way you got that? So the value is created by people, but in essence, it never has. It's not always been created by people. It's always had some kind of technological assistance. I give you a funny example, which is actually in the book, where of of a good friend of mine who. Again, he'd actually so this is turning into mental health chat, but he had a lot of mental health problems in life, and sort of finally managed to get a girlfriend, a long-term girlfriend, and it was wonderful, and he's having a great time, and he'd sort of recovered from a lot of his issues, and and she cut off the relationship with him all of a sudden, she just like like he was like this could be marriage like this is almost could marriage with her. They've been seeing each other for nine months, and she just disappeared out the blue. She knew he knew she was still alive, but beyond that, no no contact at all. And he went he went wild like he just holed up in his flat. He paced around like a lion. He hated it. He then went and saw a therapist. He said many therapists before. Didn't work out for him again and again. And he turned himself to ChatGPT and started telling ChatGPT what was going on. And he could do this at two a.m. in the morning. He could record long voice notes whenever he felt down, and ChatGPT would then help him work through those issues. He could then ask ChatGPT, "Can you please reference this against some psychodynamic approaches rather than any kind of cognitive behavioral processes? Because I want to go deeper into the understanding of where I've got this idea from. And he credits ChatGPT as the best form of therapy he's ever had because he was partially in control of it, but he could do it at any time whenever he needed it, and he could, you know, it wasn't just one hour a week or two hours a week. You know, it was constant, and like when we get to that point, like I know we're just feeding ourselves, but because there's no, but there's a lot of value there. There's a lot of value that the machine is giving him, Speaker 6 1:06:47 yeah. Speaker 1 1:06:47 And even though we don't like to admit that that the that there is as much value there, therapists hate that comment that that description. Well, yeah, and I Kurt Nelson 1:06:58 know. I mean, I I know there's there's also the the stories where again it sounds like your friend has some experience with that and could lead it to a certain degree. It's the point you talked about earlier with the younger generation at work, who are afraid to use it because they can't tell if the output is good or bad. That if you don't have that, it could lead either way, right? And so you could, which is some of the issues that you hear about from that. I, it's, it's just there's so much like over the next 235, years that is just going to happen because the technology is is improving and changing, and how we're using it is is being tested and challenged. And again, I just it's going to be fascinating. And will we habituate, Tim Houlihan 1:07:43 or will there be enough luddites to hold the water, the you know, the tide off the shore? Yeah, that's question. Speaker 1 1:07:51 Yeah, I think one of the things that maybe differentiates like a lot of the thinking that I see in the West versus a lot of thinking I see in somewhere like China is that we have a lot of, and I'm not saying what's right and wrong here, but we have a lot of debate in the West about the ethics of it. You know, what's the ethical standpoint that ChatGPT should take when offering someone therapy, and should you, as an individual, give a AI that kind of sort of godlike power over you, given it doesn't actually have a moral and ethical standpoint. Kurt Nelson 1:08:28 Yeah, Speaker 1 1:08:29 or places like China in the east, they go. You know what? AI has learned from the sum total of human civilization, so that's essentially what it's representing, and as long as I get an answer back that I like, I'm going to trust it. And as soon as I stop getting an answer that I like, I'm going to stop trusting it. And it's kind of like comes back to that idea: is are we culturally optimistic or are we culturally pessimistic about certain things? Yeah, I'm not saying what's right and wrong, but that's that's certainly the debate I see falling out. Tim Houlihan 1:09:06 Ali, I think that that's a great place to end. I wanted to just thank you so so much for being a guest on Behavior Grooves today. Speaker 1 1:09:13 I've loved having to chat to you guys. We could go on for hours, couldn't we? So thank you very very much. We could, Tim Houlihan 1:09:18 yeah, we could. There's two more pages of questions to ask. Thank you Speaker 1 1:09:24 very much for having me. Kurt Nelson 1:09:33 Welcome to our grooving session, where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Ollie. Have a free-flowing conversation, maybe, and we groove on whatever else comes into our sick emphatic brains. There we go. Oh Tim Houlihan 1:09:47 snap! That's that is well that is well said. Don't don't you mean don't you love it that your AI loves you though? Isn't it pretty great? Kurt Nelson 1:09:57 My AI does love me. My AI. Thinks I'm I'm cool. They think I'm great. They think I have the best ideas ever. And even when I push back, when it when the AI is wrong, it it doesn't get mad at me. It just it just says, "Oh, you're right. I should have thought of that. You are so good. Tim Houlihan 1:10:19 Because you are. Kurt Nelson 1:10:21 I don't need AI. I have you. You you always are so kind. Tim Houlihan 1:10:27 Before we get into our conversation about stuff that Ali was saying, and it's it's so important. I'm really excited about grooveing on this, but I do just want to call out a couple things, like our Facebook Behavioral Grooves community page is just-it's just really lovely. It's growing quickly. People are just really great contributors, and I just wanted to do a little shout out to people who are really engaging with really interesting questions: Kevin Fenton, Matt Arnold, Paul Hebert, Debbie Lead, Roberts Brannan, like just really fun conversations and interesting ideas. I just wanted to start by saying thank you for for that. Kurt Nelson 1:11:11 I agree. I agree that they add real deep insights. I mean, some of the questions that we ask out there are kind of light, you know, and and fun. Others get a little bit deeper, and you know, people respond to both. And I appreciate all of that conversation and the interaction that we have. And so, please, if you haven't already joined the group, please go out and join it. If you are a member of the group, sometimes I don't think those feeds get like out to everybody, so make sure you go out and just check us out and go. Hey, I haven't seen anything. We're posting questions out there multiple times a week. So if you're not seeing something in any week, just go out and and search it out yourself. So Tim Houlihan 1:11:54 we want your feedback. We want your input on that. We want to engage in a conversation with you. We're you know, regardless of where you're at on however you feel about something, we absolutely want to hear what you have to say. Okay, Kurt. Yeah. So, what's what's wrong? What's wrong with AI sycophancy? What what's what's wrong with that? What's the problem? Kurt Nelson 1:12:16 So, Ali, I think hit on something that I've been thinking about, and you probably have been thinking about that, right? Is that the big risk of of AI is its impact on us as humans, on us as a human community of our culture, and how that changes us because we're always changing. Culture is always changing. We are always changing as people, but we kind of know the ways that that has happened over the course of time. And yes, you know, the industrial revolution shifted us drastically. The car shifted us drastically. Airplanes that can get us across the world under a day changes things. All of those change us. I mean, you can go on and on and on. There's a fundamental difference, I think, and people can disagree with this, but there's a fundamental difference in AI and how it interacts with us. It is the first time that we are dealing with something that feels as human as it does, and there's a replacement component that can happen with that, but then as we've also talked about, it's this flattery. It it learned us so well that it reflects us back to ourselves, but it only reflects back the good parts. It it's the you know it's the it's the funeral. So we sorry people are going to get morbid here, but we had asked about you know one of our group questions in the group community is about funerals and different things. And one that somebody said is that funerals are always they just talk about like how wonderful this person was and how great and what a saint they were, and we know that's not true. And AI is just the funeral speech in everyday life all the time. You are a saint. You are so wonderful. You bring joy to every person that you touch. Right. So, Tim Houlihan 1:14:37 so that's a a tip if you're thinking about planning for your funeral and you want to have control over your own eulogy, get your AI agent to write it because it's going to be really lovely. Here's here's the the the part that struck me about our conversation with Ali is that AI isn't going to. Really outright disagree with you. It's not really going to push back and say you're wrong. Whereas if if you and I are in a conversation and we're talking about something that we're writing together, and you go, "I don't think I'd approach it that way, yeah, and I go, "Well, why not? And then you have to you come up with an argument as you you make a stand, and I was like, "Well, I think it should be this way. And we, and it's we. There might be some friction around that, but AI doesn't have any friction. Kurt Nelson 1:15:29 AI doesn't have any friction. And now you can set the the defaults. The defaults are to be that that kind, nice, you know, sycophantic kind of piece in that, and I there there are ways that you can go and turn that off on which I just did that I Tim Houlihan 1:15:46 just did that yesterday for the first time. Did you? Yeah, and you can set Kurt Nelson 1:15:50 the the those. And so I recommend everybody here just please go out and do that. But but yeah, the the hard part is is that AI. might like recommend something differently, but it is always that idea of it doesn't do it where it's disagreeing with you so much. It it doesn't push back, so we are always still bright, Speaker 6 1:16:20 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:16:20 still wonderful, and that means we don't have friction, right? And friction is what you just said-that part where you and I are writing something, and I go, you know, I wouldn't do it this way, and you go, I would, and I go, no, I'm actually, I actually think that's wrong, and there's friction there, Tim Houlihan 1:16:40 right? And right, Kurt Nelson 1:16:41 and then we have to get into it and then we have to clarify our reason why and then we have to try to convince the other person that this is the better way or be convinced by that other person and that is where you go oh yeah I see that now and we maybe tweak it we do something different with it, but that's where learning happens, and that's not what we get with AI, Tim Houlihan 1:17:07 right? I also love an example that you talk about a lot. Of five years ago, if you're a salesperson on a sales team and you you get a pushback from a client, and you don't know what to do, you're new, and so I don't know how to respond. So what am I going to do? I'm going to talk to my manager. I'm going to send an email to my teammates. I might bring it up at a team meeting, and then there's some discussion. and And one person on the team says, "Well, the way that you handle this is this way, and somebody else says, "No, no, no, do it this way. And like you get you get this collective. Not only do you get the social benefit, the social exchange, but you get these different points of view. With AI, you say I'm having trouble with my client that push back on this one thing, and you get a world class response in 10 seconds, and it's just one. It's this is the way. It's not here's five ways. Pick one. Kurt Nelson 1:18:00 This is the way. Sounds Mandalorian. There you go. But yes, it's that that part. I didn't even think about that part. Right. The the idea of you're getting multitudes of viewpoints on this, and there's inherent friction in that because they might be different. And what we realize in that is that there isn't one way to answer this. There are multitudes, and I have to find the way that works for me. I have to be the one who discovers. I can take a piece of Tim's advice. I'm going to take a piece of Paul's advice. I'm going to take a piece of Aaron's advice, and I will mix and match those together. Right? I think that's cool. Tim Houlihan 1:18:48 Yeah. The other thing that I think was really, really interesting about this discussion, and this got us talking about about AI, because you've been doing a lot of research on AI. But does it matter if AI is real? Does it matter if does it matter to us if we know that the sycophancy that's coming back to us is being done by a large language model, yeah, and not you know that is there to quote unquote serve us? Does it does it matter? Because when we hear when we read those words, does it feel like doesn't matter? I I asked the question, I got a great response. Kurt Nelson 1:19:31 But this, so this is where it's it's interesting, and this is I think one of the marked differences of AI versus all the other technology advances that we have, and is the fact that when we're interacting with AI, it is fluent. It sounds like it is a person. It interacts with us. As if it was a person. Have you ever used AI on its voice mode? Tim Houlihan 1:20:07 Where you? But I've seen people doing Kurt Nelson 1:20:10 it. So I did that in the car the other day, and my AI has a British accent, I think, and it's really interesting. But but there you go. Tim Houlihan 1:20:20 So it's definitely smarter than you, of course, because it has a British accent. Kurt Nelson 1:20:26 Anybody with a British accent is smarter than I am. But I'm having a conversation with it, and and it is responding in a humanistic way. It's like, oh yeah, well right, like at pauses where I'm making pauses in my thing, just like we do, it's freaky. It really is. But this idea that AI is real or not, we forget it. We forget that it's not real because it sounds so realistic, but there are some things about it that you know in the back of our brain. I know that this is a this is an algorithm that is just doing this. It's not really thinking. It's just doing a massive compute computation of looking for the next best word in the large language models, but still, it sounds convincing. It sounds real, and there are examples of people who use it for therapy. There are examples of people who use it for friendship. There are examples of people who use it to not just find out what a recipe is, but like what does this meal mean, and how it you know that's all different ways that people connect with AI in a way that is real, that is more like a human connection, and that's the scary part too. Tim Houlihan 1:22:04 And if you choose to not be aware, if you choose to say, "I don't care if it's real or not, I don't care that it's being sycophantic, I don't care that it's trying to flatter me. If you just find that entertaining, I think that that that's totally great. I'm going to express a value judgment here, but if you actually take that stuff seriously, I'm concerned. I'm reminded of I think I was seven years old and went to a state fair, and in the United States, state fairs oftentimes have carnivals associated with them, so of course they're mostly agricultural based, and it's about livestock and things like that. But but there's a midway they call it the midway in the in the carnival where they have a bunch of games and rides Kurt Nelson 1:22:54 and games and rides hucksters yeah Tim Houlihan 1:22:57 yeah exactly and the hawkers are calling to get the crowds in to play the games because they they show you how easy it is to play the game. Kurt Nelson 1:23:06 Just sink the softball into this milk crate, you know. Put toss this ring over these soda bottles. The you know Tim Houlihan 1:23:14 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:23:15 pop a balloon with this dart, you know. Tim Houlihan 1:23:17 And it and the the hawkers, the the guys that control the games, they make it look really easy because they know the trick. Like they know that there's some illusion in it, and they draw people in with this overconfidence. Like, oh, I can do that. And when I was seven years old, I thought this looks so easy. I can do this. I can I can toss the ring so it lands perfectly over the you know the the Coca Cola bottle, but that you only that it requires a lot of skill to do that, and the and the guys who run the game they have that skill, and they're making it look easy, so they draw you in and take your money, and I feel like to some degree if AI's flattery is sort of like us getting into this game that we don't know how hard it is. I don't think that we're skilled enough to know that there's that we're buying into some illusion. Kurt Nelson 1:24:15 Well, this is the entire concern Tim Houlihan 1:24:16 for me. Kurt Nelson 1:24:17 I think it's a great concern, and I love the metaphor of this carnival and the the hucksters, and one of the things that we were talking about earlier before we got on was, you know, AI never initiates a discussion. You brought this up. It was, and I thought I didn't even think about that. Right, AI doesn't come to you and go, "Hey, Kurt, what are you doing today? You know, Tim Houlihan 1:24:40 it's right. Kurt Nelson 1:24:42 We are always the one initiating, and AI is responding. So we feel like we're in the driver's seat. We feel like we're in control. But just like being playing that game at a carnival, we're not in control, and. There is a part of this that we give up that control, and we don't even realize it. Tim Houlihan 1:25:07 Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, that's a good thought to to leave on. Any other any other closing thoughts that you want to add in before we? Kurt Nelson 1:25:16 I loved the part that Ali talked about listening to the silences and what people don't say, I think that that we could have done a whole episode on that because I think that's really important. And yeah, it's like look what what don't you hear, what don't you see, what don't what aren't they doing can tell you as much as what they are doing or saying or doing, Tim Houlihan 1:25:44 which engages some critical thinking, and that's hard. Kurt Nelson 1:25:48 Which AI can destroy because if we just outsource our our thinking to AI, we you know we are sounding like AI doomers, aren't we? Tim Houlihan 1:25:57 No, we we shouldn't be that. I do also something that didn't come up in the interview that I just want to call out. When we talked to Ali, London was a massive under a massive heat dome. Kurt Nelson 1:26:12 God, Tim Houlihan 1:26:13 he had no air conditioning in his flat. He was it was like 90 degrees Fahrenheit. It was close to. It was coming up on 40 degrees in his Kurt Nelson 1:26:24 apartment. In his Tim Houlihan 1:26:25 apartment, Kurt Nelson 1:26:26 yeah. Again, think about London. There, it's not built for this type of heat. Tim Houlihan 1:26:32 No, and Kurt Nelson 1:26:33 the buildings do not have nice airflow and all sorts of other things that buildings that are built for heat do, and there's definitely not central air conditioning, you know. So, Tim Houlihan 1:26:45 so just a shout out to Ollie for just being a trooper for keeping his literally had his feet in in an ice bath while we were talking. So I just want to say that. I also want to say, hey, subscribe to our Substack. Get on Substack because you get great articles and a totally different perspective than just what happens in the the episodes themselves. It's and it's really fun because and there's easy links then for every artist that we talk about, every musical act that we talk about gets linked in in there. And I think that that's super fun and super easy resource, right there. Kurt Nelson 1:27:22 Just for just for that reason alone. I mean, you should sign up. Yeah, absolutely. Of course, you know, join our Behavioral Grooves community on Facebook. Leave us a review. All of those things. Anything that you can do to help expand our our reach and the people that we touch, we would be so appreciative of. So thank you for doing any of that. And this week, if you're using AI, try noticing one thing that AI is fawning over you about, is agreeing with you that maybe, just maybe, deserves a little bit more pushback that that wasn't a great idea. I might not be as wonderful as AI is saying I am. So, and use that this week to go out and find your groove. Transcribed by https://otter.ai